


Angrily and Reluctantly Domestic

by Qzil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Human Castiel, Human Meg, Meg Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qzil/pseuds/Qzil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Meg lives, finds a way to stay topside when the Winchesters close the gates of Hell, slowly becomes human, lives with Kevin, and accidentally marries Castiel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angrily and Reluctantly Domestic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rashaka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rashaka/gifts).



> Originally written for Rashaka over on tumblr. Basically an AU where the final trial to close the gates is different and non-lethal.

Sam saves her from Crowley, hurling holy water over both of them as he rushes out of the crypt. Crowley lets out an angry screech and turns around to grab the boys, but Meg, still weak from the torture and Crowley’s beating, falls to the ground and screams.

Sam picks her up and bundles her into the backseat of the Impala, her flesh still smoking. She whimpers unashamedly from the pain as they speed off, and she can hear Dean shouting at Sam for what he’s done.

“Cas told us to protect her!” Sam argues. Dean’s still steaming when they pull into a motel room and Sam gently lays her on the bed. Meg shrugs off his huge hands and stands up, swaying, to make a run for the door.

“Don’t think so,” Dean spits, pushing her back on the bed. “Sam’s got it in his head that we have to _protect you_.”

She still tries to rise from the bed. She doesn’t want the Winchesters to ‘take care’ of her in any way, doesn’t want to be even further in debt to Team Free Fuckup than she already is, especially with Sam saving her life already. Sam puts his hands on her shoulders and sits her back down gentler than Dean did. He stares at her, and Meg slumps her shoulders, too tired to fight him.

.

They dump her at a safehouse, paint the outside of it with devil’s traps, and speed off to continue their mission to close the gates of Hell. She only hopes that they’ll kill Crowley before they do it, so she doesn’t have to spend eternity being tortured by the smarmy dick in the Pit.

Sam calls almost every day to ask if there’s any demonic activity in the area. She always answers with “How the fuck would I know?” before she hangs up the phone.

Three weeks later, they open the door and drag Kevin through. The Littlest Prophet looks half-starved and homeless, twitching far too much for Meg’s taste. They tell her to watch him and that they’ll send someone by with some food before speeding off again. Sam shrugs and mouths ‘I’m sorry’ at her before they slam the door.

The first thing she does is make Kevin shower and eat something. She wraps him in a fluffy pink bathrobe she’d found in an upstairs closet and refuses to let him leave the table until he eats something so he’ll stop shaking and twitching.

The words _trauma_ and _low blood-sugar_ flit through her mind while he eats, so she makes a glass of ice tea and sets it in front of him.

.

Being trapped in a safehouse is, unsurprisingly really boring.

Every two weeks or so, the Winchesters or one of their contacts will knock on the door to the little cabin and drop off food and water for Kevin. They always eye her suspiciously, and she’d had to throw one of them out the door when he’d started muttering an exorcism under his breath at her. She’s trapped in the cabin with Kevin for two months before she convinces him to break one of the traps for her so she can leave the house.

She tells him not to leave under any circumstances; because no matter what Sam promised Castiel, she has no doubts that they’d kill her if she lost the prophet, and walks to the nearest town. She leaves at dawn and makes it there by nightfall, declining rides from several truck drivers on the road.

The first thing she does is hit the bar and steal some money off some drunken frat boys in the corner table. She spends the rest of the night walking around the city, strolling into twenty-four hour drug stores. She buys a box of hair dye and powdered ice tea mix before heading back toward the highway.

On the way out of town, she passes a fabric store and stares into the window, hazy memories of her human life flash through her head as she stands outside it. Without conscious thought, she glances around and punches her hand through the glass door before unlocking it and stepping inside.

The alarm blares as she casually strolls through the store and throws needles and thread into her bag from the drugstore. She rips a whole hook full of embroidery hoops from the wall and they dangle from her arms like bracelets, too large to fit in the bag. On her way out, she throws a bolt of white fabric over her shoulder.

The walk back to the cabin takes most of the night. Kevin stares at her as she walks back in, dumps her bounty on the table, and resets the trap.

“You should sleep. They’ll have my head if you waste away,” she snaps at him, walking into the bathroom with her hair dye.

The water in the shower is scalding hot, and when she steps out, her meatsuit’s skin looks raw and red. She wipes the steam from the mirror and watches the blisters bubble and heal on her borrowed skin before she lets herself look at her now-dark hair.

When the mirror clears on its own, Meg examines her meatsuit for any evidence of Crowley’s torture. She turns around and around, examining every inch of skin before she’s satisfied. The skin is clear and unblemished, save for the scars on her abdomen from the holy fire. She smiles at her reflection and twirls her dark hair, the last step of clearing Crowley’s work from her, before going to make sure Kevin sleeps.

.

She embroiders _everything._

It starts with wrangling Kevin’s shirt from him and insisting on sewing the tears, just to have something to do while they wait for the Winchesters to remember they exist. After that, she stares at the stolen supplies on her table for two weeks before she picks them up. When she closes her eyes, she half-remembers her human mother instructing her on how to sew and embroider, and she can almost see the image in her mind, almost feel the material in her hands.

When Kevin finally sleeps, she sets to work. Her first attempts come out clumsy, with crooked stitches too far apart. She shreds and burns them all, staring into the fireplace with hate in her eyes as she watches them burn.

 _What did you expect?_ a voice whispers in her head. _Demons don’t make pretty things._

Until the memories slam into her full-force, and she furiously works on her project until the sun weakly shines through the window.

Kevin raises his eyebrows at the pillow that reads ‘Prison Sweet Home’ resting on the little couch in front of the television. The scraps of material from the old pillow she’d ripped the stuffing from lie in the fireplace.

“Don’t,” she warns him. “You say anything; I don’t care what they’ll do. I will fucking kill you.”

Kevin just throws a log into the fire and starts it up.

.

Castiel shows up while she’s working on the cabin’s curtains, a pizza in one hand and a sheepish look on his face. She ignores him and focuses on finishing the bright gold flowers she’s working into the red material.

“I did not know you enjoyed such traditionally feminine pursuits,” he says, setting the pizza on the table.

“This is nothing. You should see the stuff I did when I was human,” she replies, setting her work on the table next to the pizza. “My husband had the best banner of all the lords, and my daughter’s wedding dress was so beautifully embroidered our liegelord’s wife herself asked me to make a dress for her.”

“I was not aware you remembered being human.”

“Shut up.” She pushes herself away from the table and presses herself against him, smirking. “Wanna show me what else you learned from the pizza man before those boys throw me back down to Hell?” He opens his mouth to speak, and she cuts him off with a kiss.

The next morning, Kevin looks traumatized again as she puts a plate of re-heated pizza in front of him.

.

“What happened to the tablet?” she asks as she finishes the curtains.

“It is safe,” he replies, running his fingers through her hair from behind her. “I am glad you changed it back. It suits you far better than the blonde did.”

“Whatever. Stop touching me like that.”

.

The Winchesters finally show up three weeks after Castiel does. Dean stares furiously at the amount of things in the cabin that have been embroidered, but Sam looks like he’s about to burst into laughter when he sees her Prison Sweet Home pillow on the couch.

“Kevin looks better,” Sam tells her later. She grunts.

“You kept me safe, and I kept him safe. You saved my life and I kept him alive. We’re square,” she says. “I don’t owe you anything, and you don’t owe me anything anymore.”

“After this you might,” he replies, handing her a box. Meg opens it and laughs at the pile of forged papers for her. Her new birth certificate reads ‘Megan Joyce Masters’ and states that she is twenty-seven years old. Her new birthday is July seventh, and, according to the other papers, she’s a registered nurse. “We saw Crowley again and told him that we killed you. He doesn’t really believe us, but he has bigger problems than you now. As long as you lay low, you should be okay.”

“What’s the condition?” she asks, leaning back on the couch.

“Take Kevin,” Sam says promptly. “We need someone to watch him.”

“Why do all this if you’re just gonna slam me back in the Pit?”

Sam looks away from her. “You’re kinda our ally, shitty things you did or not. If there are enough wards where you are when we close the gates, you should be stuck here. But we don’t know what it’ll do to you. With Hell closed, your powers might be…less.”

“I’ll take the chance, then.” Meg slams the box shut. “Deano didn’t want you to tell me this, did he?”

“He thinks you deserve Hell,” Sam tells her. Meg barks a laugh.

.

So she buys a house.

She and Kevin find a little two bedroom, two bathroom house in some suburb where the local High School is hiring a nurse and move in. The first day, Meg and Kevin cover the base molding of the house in warding sigils and move the furniture over it to cover them up from prying eyes. Meg drags him to the grocery store and uses the Winchester’s stolen cards to stock them up with enough food and beer to last them until her paychecks start coming in.

They furnish their house from a little auction the next town over, and Castiel only raises his eyebrows at their hodgepodge of furniture. Meg goes on an embroidery spree before school starts up, feeling the need to do something in the late hours of the night when Kevin is asleep and the television shows only shitty infomercials.

Castiel visits her a few times a week, in between helping the Winchesters with their plans to close the gates. Before the school season starts, he stays, claiming the Winchesters no longer need his help. She thinks Dean is just fighting with him about her, but lets him stay.

“Just don’t pull any more of that ‘thorny beauty’ shit and we’ll be fine,” she tells him.

.

Working as a school nurse in a small town _sucks._

Pretending to be human and handing out pads and taking the temperatures of surly middle-class kids has her wishing for the rack, just for a bit of excitement to her day. The only exciting part of her day is giving the school’s one diabetic kid his insulin shot every day, but even playing with the needle loses its appeal.

But, she figures it could be worse. She gets weekends and holidays off, and it’s better than being in the damn hotel bathroom getting beaten on by Crowley.

Castiel stays at the house all day, watching over Kevin and taking care of the lawn and small garden the previous occupants left behind. She spends her nights making sure that Kevin eats and that Castiel hasn’t accidentally killed any of her plants.

 _Look at you, pretending to be human,_ she thinks as she sets a meatloaf in front of Kevin. It’s fairly peaceful until Mrs. Simmons, one of the English teachers, invites herself over to Meg’s house.

She shows up on Saturday afternoon with a cake that says ‘Welcome to the Neighborhood!’ in green and pink icing and walks into the house before Meg invites her in or can test her. Kevin slips her holy-water ice cubes and Meg watches her handle the silver knife as she cuts them all a slice of her cake and compliments them on the house.

Castiel walks out of her room, frowning, and holding his tie in his hands. “Oh, is this your husband?” Mrs. Simmons asks, beaming at her. Meg’s eyes nearly bulge out of her head, but Castiel only nods.

“Yes, Meg and I have not been married long,” he says, walking up to the table. “Meg, could you tie this for me?”

“Jesus, Clarence,” she mutters, tying the tie around his neck. Mrs. Simmons is still beaming at them, and Meg resists the urge to bleed the woman dry in their kitchen.

“You two one of those new-agey couples who don’t do rings?” the woman asks. Meg gives her a short nod and Mrs. Simmons continues to chat about the school and the house, complimenting her embroidery skills. “You know, we have a little crafting club, just some of us teachers and girls from town. You should come by!”

“I’ll think about it,” Meg says through gritted teeth. The woman doesn’t leave for another hour, and when she does, Meg whirls on Castiel. “Married? What the fuck, Clarence?”

“It is a good alibi,” he says mildly. “I would not want to shame you by having it known that we are unwed lovers.”

“This isn’t the middle ages anymore!” she hisses. Castiel shrugs and she lets out a scream and stomps into her room, slamming the door.

“Hey, does this mean you’re my new mommy and daddy?” Kevin asks sarcastically from the living room. Meg stomps back out of her bedroom and whacks him lightly upside the head.

.

It would be funny, except Cas and Meg do sort of wind up adopting Kevin.

Meg doesn’t find out until Sam and Dean show up in October with another box filled with papers, this time for Kevin. They glare at her and Castiel before shoving the box into Kevin’s hands and dragging her angel outside.

Meg helps Kevin go through the box, ignoring the shouting outside. She finds his old school records, altered slightly to show Kevin dropping out of school for ‘mental health’ reasons, doctor’s records, and papers that say his name is now officially Kevin Masters, and that Meg is his legal guardian.

When she reads that, she stomps outside; right into the middle of Dean and Castiel’s shouting match, and punches Dean in the face.

“What the fuck, Winchester?” she shouts when he stumbles up from the ground. Sam shushes her, and Meg whirls around and pokes Castiel in the chest. “Did you know about this? Apparently Kevin is my _son!_ ” Dean lunges for her, and Sam and Castiel grab both of them and hold them away from each other. Jeanne, the sweet old lady next door who has a yappy little purse-dog, pokes her head out the window.

“Is everything alright, honey?” she asks, glaring at the Winchester boys. “Are they bothering you?”

“Do not worry, Mrs. Roberts. They are leaving now,” Castiel says calmly, moving down to clasp his hand with Meg’s. Jeanne nods and glares at the Winchesters ones more time before slamming her window shut. “Meg, I will be gone for a few weeks with Sam and Dean to take care of some issues. Please, do not be angry.”

Dean flashes the middle finger at her as he walks back to his car with Castiel, but Sam stays behind, shuffling his feet on their welcome mat. “It’s what’s best for Kevin,” he tells her. “He wants to be back in school, and since you’re watching him…” Sam shrugs and looks up at her. “Think of us as even for the fake IDs and stuff if you watch him. It’s only for a little while. Until we close the gates.”

Meg walks back into the house and throws herself onto the couch to finish working on her embroidery, a half-remembered design from her human life. “Meg, I need the car and the card. I need new clothes, and notebooks, and a planner, and pencils, and binders, and we need a printer, and I need a computer for school, and-”

“Kevin,” Meg grinds out, accidentally stabbing herself with the needle. “It’s six o’clock in the afternoon. Go eat dinner and leave me the fuck alone. Tomorrow. We’ll go tomorrow.”

Kevin perks up at the thought of buying school supplies, and eats his dinner without complaint. When he bounces into the kitchen at the crack of dawn while Meg is finishing up the wolves, she throws the remote at his head.

.

Soon, Meg not only finds herself in the unique position of a demon pretending to be human, but in the unique position of a demon forced to _mother._

Watching over him is like the first days in the cabin. She has to make sure he takes study breaks and eats and does things other than pack himself with schoolwork and extracurriculars. “If you waste away to nothing, those assholes will stick me with that damn knife, or send me down to Crowley. When I tell you to eat or take a break, you do what I say!” she screeches at him. Several of the teachers compliment her on how well-behaved her ward is, and how smart, and she forces herself to smile and accept their compliments.

With Castiel gone, the house feels empty. She buys a gun and takes to hunting in the woods, cooking half-remembered recipes from her time as a human, and others that she knows from thousands of years of memories from different meatsuits. She learns that she’s really good at soup.

Kevin insists on decorating the house for Halloween, and Mrs. Simmons and a few of the other teachers rope her into doing group costumes with them. “We’re all going as witches this year!” she tells Meg cheerfully after school. “It’ll be fun, Meg!”

“I said no, Maria!” Meg growls. Maria Simmons laughs and tugs on her arm.

“C’mon, Meg. Please?” she whines.

“Stop making that noise and I’ll fucking do it!” Maria laughs and flashes a triumphant smile. “I’m not putting on a fake nose and warts.”

.

Everything goes smoothy on Halloween until she opens the door expecting another trick-or-treating kid but finds the Winchesters instead, Castiel held up between them. She can sense the change immediately as they drag him into the house and lay him on her bed.

“What the fuck did you do to him?” she yells, dropping the bowl of candy on the porch and slamming the door with her boot. “Clarence? Clarence!”

“Metatron stole his Grace,” Sam says quietly. “He’s human, Meg.”

“No shit, Sherlock!” she snaps. “You were supposed to watch him!” Dean opens his mouth to reply, but Meg’s eyes turn black and she throws him into the wall. “Get. Out. Don’t come back here. Every time you two show up, something happens. If I’d just laid low and never helped you in the first place, I’d be fine right now. I wouldn’t have gotten tortured for over a year by Crowley, I wouldn’t have almost died in that damn alley, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be stuck here playing human and playing mommy.”

“We saved your life, you bitch!” Dean shouts. Meg twists her hand and he lets out a yelp as she turns to Sam.

“We’re square, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t owe you, and you don’t owe me,” she tells him. “You owe Castiel here for this mess you got him into. Find a way to mail him some papers so he can actually have a life now that he’s stuck like this. Tell me when you assholes are going to close the gates so I can stay topside and then get the fuck out of my life.” She releases Dean from the wall and flings him out of her bedroom and then out onto the front step, scattering the candy bowl.

When Castiel wakes up, he cries. Meg sits with him like she did in the mental hospital and spoon-feeds him some soup.

.

Three weeks later, she gets a call from Sam saying to stay in her house and ward it heavily. She calls in sick to work and calls Kevin out of school, saying her whole household has a bug, and they spend the day coating every surface of the house in devil’s traps and every other protective sigil they can fit. Meg makes Castiel haul in buckets of blood, drained from different animals during her hunting, and the three of them cut into themselves as well.

When every surface in their house is covered and the place reeks of blood, Meg huddles with Castiel and Kevin in their living room, the news playing on the television. She has a spot in the garden picked out for her meatsuit if this doesn’t work and she gets dragged down to Hell again, anyway, so all that’s left do is wait.

Kevin sits huddled on the floor, working his way through his math homework, occasionally looking up from the book and glancing at the clock. When the appointed time rolls around, Castiel grips her hand, and for once she doesn’t shrug him off.

“You two bury me right under the tree in the corner, and don’t let Jeanne’s dog piss on me,” she tells them before the clock chimes. Castiel flinches, and Kevin presses so hard on his paper that he rips a hole in it. “I mean it. I’m a demon. I won’t have my corpse pissed on by a dog.” The clock begins to chime, and Meg feels _something_ pull at her, trying to drag her downwards, before the pain starts.

It hurts worse than the rack, worse than Crowley’s torture, worse than having a knife shoved into her unmentionables all those years ago. She screams as the force tries to rip her from her body, rolling away from Castiel and thrashing on her carefully-embroidered pillows.

Thousands of years of memories flash in front of her vision as the force pulls and pulls on her. Different meatsuit’s lives roll through her head and she clutches it, tearing out clumps of hair as she fights to anchor herself. Distantly, she hears Castiel yelling and clamping his hand over her mouth as the memories flash before her, childhoods and pregnancies and Sunday dinners and Christmases and weddings, all in reverse. She sees Sam Winchester’s first hunt and the real Meg Masters kneeling at mass and her college letters.

She sees her old body in a polished bronze mirror before she’d been dragged to Hell. Her daughter’s wedding, her son’s wedding, her mother’s death, her demon deal to save her stillborn child; she sees her own pregnancies and her own wedding. Embroidery lessons and stolen kisses in the stables and the kitchens flash through her mind as she rolls on the couch. She hears her human mother, faintly, calling her real name.

Her eyes fly open, blackened, as the pull suddenly stops in time with the clock chiming. She can taste blood and sulfur in her mouth, and see Castiel’s mouth moving and Kevin’s panicked expression from where he stands next to him.

“Guess we’re not burying me under the tree after all,” she quips weakly. Castiel pulls her upright into a hug on the couch and clings to her, and she lets him. When he finally pulls away, she can see smears of blood on his collar.

“You’re bleeding everywhere,” he says, stunned. Kevin runs into the kitchen and comes back with one of her dishcloths, and she doesn’t have the energy to yell at him for bringing one of her good ones. Castiel gently wipes her face, and she ignores the way her blood stains the white doves she’d embroidered on the stupid decorative thing.

The three of them stay huddled on the living room floor the entire night, sitting close. She lets Castiel cling to her until he falls asleep, head drooping down to rest on her stomach, only shoving him off her when the sun rises and she stumbles into the shower.

They spend the weekend painting over the sigils on the walls, throwing out carpets and furniture, and finding other ways to cover up the ones carved into the floors and walls of the house.

.

In the middle of the Thanksgiving weekend, Maria brings them a tray of brownies. “You don’t look so good, sweetie,” she says, opening Meg’s freezer and bringing out some ice cream for the brownies. “Trouble in paradise?”

“Just not feeling well,” Meg answers, picking at the food.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were pregnant, the way you’ve been looking lately,” Maria comments. “Maybe you should see a doctor. With that stomach thing going around, it’s only time until you catch it.” Kevin walks in with a bag of groceries and saves Meg from answering as Maria begins to ask him about school, but she still frowns down at her food.

.

She spends three hours trying to make her eyes go black in the mirror, only managing to make them flash black for a second before returning to brown. In the weeks that follow, she randomly feels weaker, finds herself actually craving food, and sleeps four times.

Maria invites them all to a Christmas party at her house, and Castiel forces them all to go just to get them out of the place that still vaguely smells of blood. It isn’t until she notices how _salty_ some of the food there tastes that she starts to panic. Halfway through the party, she apologizes to Maria, collects her ‘husband’ and Kevin, and packs them into the car. She speeds to the grocery store while Kevin and Castiel look confused in the backseat, and emerges with nothing but a huge bag of salt.

“Meg, what are you doing?” Castiel yelps when she rips open the bag and pours it over her own head outside the car. He leaps out of the car and grabs the empty bag from her as she blinks salt out of her eyes and curses.

“I’m not burning!” she yells, kicking through the line of salt piled at her feet. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Cas, I’m not burning! It doesn’t hurt. Where’s our holy water? Kevin, where’s the holy water?” Castiel bundles her into the car and tells Kevin to finish driving them home. He does, with shaking hands, and they watch Meg splash herself with holy water and curse when her skin doesn’t smoke.

She pops a holy water ice cube into her mouth and throws one of their rugs painted with a devil’s trap onto the floor and walks over it, again and again, until the ice cube melts in her mouth.

“I think she’s gone crazy,” Kevin whispers when Meg begins to laugh hysterically.

“I pretended to be human so well I’m actually becoming one,” Meg rasps out. “Holy fucking shit, Clarence.”

.

Sam Winchester shows up at their door with an angry Dean in tow. They go through the usual rituals with her and Dean’s eyes nearly pop out of his head when she steps through the devil’s trap and gulps down the holy water right from Sam’s flask.

She begins learning how to actually be human instead of just pretending to be one.

.

It works out pretty well, considering the thousands of years of memories in her head an all the guilt that should be weighing her down. But, even trapped in a human body with a shiny, new human soul (she thinks), she still has a demon’s conscience.

She goes to work and embroiders and hunts and cooks. Castiel takes care of the house and shovels the walkways when it snows and begins to plan for the garden when the snow melts. Kevin works on his schooling and begins looking at colleges while Meg stresses the need to live low-profile and stay out of the Ivy League, no matter how well he would fit in there.

It hits her one day as she’s standing the kitchen, mixing mugs of hot chocolate, how domestic her life had become with the need to lay low. Castiel puts his arms around her waist from behind and rests his chin on her shoulder.

“You could leave now, you know,” he says, staring at the window. “With Hell closed and Crowley dead, you no longer have to ‘lay low’ as you call it. You could go anywhere. Vanish.”

“This is as good as anywhere else,” she answers, shrugging his hands from her. He’s quiet for a moment as he puts his arms back around her middle.

“I want a ring,” he says quietly. Meg stiffens in his arms and he hugs her tighter. “If we must live as humans, I do not want to lie about our attachment any longer.”

“We’re not people, not really,” Meg whispers. “You’re still an angel and I’m still a demon, deep down. This isn’t…”

“I love you,” he breathes into her hair. “You stayed with me when no one else did. You cared for me. You took me in.”

Meg doesn’t say it back. “If you really want one, we’ll go get you one,” she says instead. “Now get off me so we can all go watch this stupid fucking movie.”

“Are you my new daddy?” Kevin asks when she walks into the living room with their mugs on the tray. Meg twitches and walks right back into the kitchen, dumping Kevin’s down the skink while the boy laughs.

 


End file.
